TABLE TALK
Exegi monumentum
DENIS BROGAN
I am delighted that I can turn away from the drab trivialities or worse of our national (and international) life, from Biafra, from the Attorney-General of the United States, from the bold gerrymandering of Sunny Jim Callaghan (Irish blood will tell), to one of those fruitful English controversies that divert' and instruct. The promising row over the kind of memorial to Churchill will fill the Times (and, I hope, other journals) for weeks to come.
I had better declare my interest at once. I am for a fountain or a cluster of foun- tains rather than for any statue we are likely to get. First of all, London has enough statues, good, bad and worse. They (and other marble monuments) often com- memorate the totally or deservedly for- gotten. Who, for example was Lord Cheyls- more? Who was Lord Napier (I can answer that). Some commemorate, in absurd monuments, people who (I think) shouldn't be commemorated at all. I don't admire Smuts, but I am not quite sure he deserves the comic monument in Parliament Square. It would be hard on Winston to put him there beside some invisible club porter help- ing on Dizzy with his overcoat or even beside Saint Gaudens's too, too elegant Lincoln.
There are, of course, interesting statues that are not particularly good. As I have pointed out elsewhere, we foreigners learn a lot about England when we reflect how close together are the statues of Charles i and Cromwell. This is very unlike France where the Quiberon monument to Hoche is really a cri de triomphe of bleus over blancs, after the Dreyfus case and where, for long enough, a very fine statue of Louis )(Iv at Lyons was deprived of the name of the great prince who was commemorated. How much wiser and more genuinely his- torically-minded were the Bolsheviks who preserved the 'Bronze Horseman' that in what was Petersburg commemorated the eponymous hero of the city and how elegant the simple inscription 'Petro Primo Cathe- rina Sectmdal If the monument really sur- vived because of Pushkin, all the better.
London is well provided with bad statues. There is Haig, a warning against equestrian statues made in England where the tailor- ing is more attended to than the art. (I knew slightly the sculptor, who had to bear in mind more the Tailor and Cutter than the Renaissance masterpiece he had planned.) After the great condottieri in Venice and Padua, even reasonably good equestrian statues, like several of those erected to Wellington, look unimpressive and although Winston was a cavalry man by training and took part in a cavalry charge in 1898 against enemies in chain armour, he is more a landsman turned sailor like Blake and Monck. But it is hard to `do' an admiral unless you stick him at the top of a pillar—and look at what happened to Nelson in Dublin!
One trouble with statues is costume. I don't know whether fifteenth century con- dottieri wore as much armour as Colleone does, but it looks all right. But if not in action, an equestrian hero of modern times looks odd. I can only think of three that appeal to me. One is Italian. It shows the Duke of Genoa falling off his horse. This is in Turin and the official story is that the Duke was having a horse shot under him at Novara or Custozza or some other ambiguous triumph of the House of Savoy. The other two (in Washington) please in a different way. General Sheridan is shown at full gallop on his famous ride of 1864 and General Andrew Jackson opposite the White House is a masterpiece of what King Auberon Quin called 'rich badness'. The Hero' is courteously raising his hat to either his military or political enemies, to Henry Clay or the disastrous brother-in-law of the Iron Duke, General Pakenham. There was an outrageous proposal to move General Jackson a few years ago. A near lynching- bee resulted.
Washington is even fuller of monuments than Rome, but the public appetite is sated, possibly by the recent and preposterous Taft memorial under the shadow of the Capitol. When a very modern maquette of an FDR memorial was shown, it was found to con- sist of a circle of slabs, inscribed with alleged quotations from FDR (probably from Sam Rosenmann). There was a dignified protest from Eleanor Roosevelt but it was a headline by the art critic of the Washing- ton Post that finished off the job: 'Instant Stonehenge'.
That there are too many statues in Paris can be granted. A great many were taken away to be melted down by the Germans in the last war. But I remember, just after the end of the Third Reich, an official friend in near-despair. The Huns hadn't melted them and there was a great danger they would be salvaged and brought back. The official was especially alarmed at the thought of the return of Gambetta. I think he has been successfully melted down; at any rate, I don't seem to remember him in the Tuileries Gardens.
Oddly enough, I think that the most satisfactory monument to Foch is in Lon- don. (I may think this because I was one of the smallish group who saw General de Gaulle make a pilgrimage there on 14 July, 1940.) The statue of Clemenceau in the Champs Elysies might suggest a solution to the Churchill problem. But does Bis- marck gain by his odd survival in those thoroughly bombed cities, Hamburg and Cologne, since the Bismarck memorials are both pioneer works in brutalism?
But I'm all for the fountain or for several fountains. If the fountain is accompanied by statuary, I don't mind. I like the Fontana di Trevi but I prefer the Piazza Navona (where the monument snubs the Mississippi). All over Rome I like (to quote from Wilfred Thorley) the
silver waters that in plenty run all dolce e ridente
round the Naiads in the pool.
I don't in the least mind being splashed by water from the fountains in Trafalgar Square. In the winter, I like Versailles and the 'vieux part solitaire es glace'. I even like, in a perverted way, the most preposterous and fourth biggest monument in Washing- ton, the memorial to the most disastrous President, James Buchanan, but there are no fountains to carry out the feeble illusion of Tivoli. I like, or liked, the musical and coloured fountains of Hamburg and the great Rhone jet of Geneva. But—and it is shaming to admit it—although I admire Petrarch and know the departement of the Vaucluse (the only departement called after a fountain), I have never seen the famous fountain. Why not put a really impressive fountain, shooting perpetually skyward, in the zoo? For did not Winston express to Julian Huxley his regrets, like the Roman child at the Colosseum, that the lions and tigers would have to be killed even if the great cats hadn't each got a Christian?
Previous page
